Flesh and Steel
by Julia456
Summary: Not everyone is superhuman.


Notes: I was watching "Turbulence" the other day - specifically, the part where Kat and Max get knocked off the bike and eat asphalt - and thinking about this friend of my family's, who blew out her ACL recently, and then I was like, "Hey, I bet Kat gets torn up trying to keep pace with Max." And that's how this fic was born.

* * *

Crunch.

The plastic bottle was flattened beneath Max's foot and promptly forgotten. Not promptly; he gave it a backwards glance to make sure he hadn't stepped on something important, like a hand or a large chunk of cash. But seeing a mere bottle, late of carbonated beverage, he lost interest and refocused on the task ahead of him: running.

He was running from the parking lot of the hospital, heading inside, and was starting to feel the lack of transphasic energy. Too much expended with too little put back - but there were more important matters at hand than how long he'd been plugged in to the portable regenerator on the ride in.

The hospital was busy, and he was coming in the front entrance. There were enough people giving him funny looks to make him realize he was still in Max mode. Max, Josh - after nearly three years of living two lives, the lines between them blurred. Still, a guy wearing a uniform and a metal chestplate was more than slightly out of place in the middle of the Del Oro Bay Hospital lobby. He figured he should waste a few precious seconds and switch back.

He changed course and headed for the restrooms, brushing past a woman leading a little boy towards the elevators. The boy stared after him, wide-eyed, and just as the elevators closed, Max heard a small voice saying, "Mommy, it was HIM!"

He grinned - the shadow of a grin, really, weighed down by the reason he was there - and ducked into the men's restroom. It was empty, and a split second later, Josh walked out. Ran out.

Running wasn't advised in hospitals, but he ran. He ran to the elevator and hit the button, and then waited, tapping his foot and muttering under his breath. The little boy and and his mom must've been going to the top floor, because it took forever before the lit number ticked down to 'G' again.

He waited still longer for the people already on the elevator to get off before climbing in.

Crunch.

A candy wrapper this time. He kicked at it ineffectively and pressed a button, hoping he remembered the floor number right; he'd been on the phone with Jefferson for less than a minute. On the ride up, he kicked the wrapper again. Didn't anyone throw trash out anymore?

The elevator stopped with the familiar lurch of gravity reasserting itself, and he was out before the ding! had finished sounding and the doors had finished sliding open. Down the hall, counting the doors, and trying not to catch the attention of the nurses. He walked now. He walked like he knew where he was going and had every right to be there, which he didn't, not being a relative.

The door was wide open, but he rapped on it as he walked in anyway, just as a formality. He smiled and tried not to look as if he'd just raced through the city streets to get there. "Hey, Kat, how are you?"

"Did you get him?" was her immediate response - more of a demand than anything else. She pushed herself up in the hospital bed, revealing a bulky shape where her right knee was.

He moved further into the room and pushed the door shut behind him - gently, so as not to attract notice. The irritation with her was sharp and quick, as it always had been. "Hello? Answer my question?"

"I am in the hospital," she said, glaring. "And if you tell me that you let Psycho escape after he put me here, I will drag myself out of this bed and kill you."

He returned her glare and dropped into the deceptively soft-looking chair next to the bed. "Of course I got him. How are you?"

She resettled herself with visible self-satisfaction. "Much better now, thank you."

"Where's Berto?"

"On a mission." She gestured at the closed door. "He's downstairs trying to out-jargon the doctors. The verbal form of beating them into submission. I give it another five minutes before they cave."

He nodded, then asked the question again: "How are you?"

"You're not gonna shut up until I tell you, huh? Okay." A tug on the blanket revealed the reason for the bulky shape: an ice pack wrapped in bandages. "I blew out my ACL."

He stared, then shifted his gaze to her face. She had a neutral expression in place, but he couldn't bring himself to duplicate it. What she'd just said so calmly was the death knell of her career as an athlete, and as a field agent. He didn't know anyone in either field who didn't fear an injury like that. Himself included.

The icy, sick feeling he'd been pushing away for the last few hours came rushing back full force. He ran a hand over his face, suddenly exhausted. "God, Kat, I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I signed on for this gig," she said, smoothing the blanket over her leg again. "I knew what I was getting into."

"So what happens?"

"Your dad is coming over with a lawyer to formally release me from my contract."

"You're quitting?" he asked, not bothering to hide his shock.

She shrugged. "I'm not. My body is."

Shock gave way to anger. "I can't believe you're just quitting," he told her, flinging out the words, trying to get a rise out of her. This apathy was a new phenomenon, and he didn't like it. "Since when do you give up? What makes you so sure this is it, Kat? What makes you think walking away is the thing to do?"

"Walking? Try limping," she snapped, showing some emotion at last. "On crutches. And, oh yeah, I'm so sure this is it because I have about two years of operations and rehab ahead of me. Did you not hear me when I said I blew out my ACL? There's nothing left, Josh! I don't even have enough tissue in there for them to glue it back together. They have to pull ligaments from a cadaver. A cadaver."

"So? People have gone back to sports after things like that." And almost never regained their prior ability level.

She closed her eyes and turned her head away, crossing her arms over her chest. After a long moment, and right before he was about to apologize, she looked at him again. He was expecting tears despite the fact that Kat never cried, but saw instead a pale, drawn face, dry but smudged with fatigue, and he wondered why he'd never noticed how small she was. Sure, she was tall, but she was slender, and the short hair went a long way towards making her look petite.

"I'm tired," she said. "I've been chasing down the bad guys with you for two years, and on my own for a while before that. Every time, I got hurt. Bruises, sprains, scrapes, snake bites - it happened to me. Not to you, but I woke up feeling it each morning. And I loved it, Josh. It was the greatest thing in the world, because I was making a difference."

"You can still make a difference."

"From behind a desk."

It was flat and apathetic, a blank statement of fact, and all the more powerful because of it. Josh had no way to counter the truth she'd spoken, so he settled for a weak attempt at a joke. "There goes my fan club, I guess."

She met his eyes, still flat, but there was the hint of fire in her voice as she said, "I didn't take this assignment to be your cheerleading section."

He opened his mouth to answer that - with a response he'd surely regret later, because as sorry as he was for her, he was also angry at himself, and at her - but there was a brisk rap on the door and then it opened.

"Hey, Josh, you made it," Berto said. Two doctors in white coats and a host of nurses came through the door around him, like water parting around a rock. "Uh - I need to speak with you in the hallway."

"Right." Josh stood and touched Kat's shoulder briefly, partner to partner. She didn't flinch, but she didn't acknowledge it either. Stoic and tough as nails. The stray cat strut, she'd called it once, only halfway joking. Forced to survive on her own, Kat now relied on no one. Or at least she hadn't, until she became part of Team Steel.

Josh had thought that their friendship would be a source of strength in crisis moments like this. And before it had. But apparently, this time was different, and he wasn't family anymore - not even a partner.

With a sense of betrayal, he left the doctors swarming over Kat and went to see what Berto wanted to talk about.

"Did you get him?"

"I got him," he said, all but rolling his eyes at everyone's persistence in asking that. Psycho was in jail this time and everything. He'd made sure of that. No one hurt his partner and got away with it. "So what's the verdict on Kat?"

"How much did she tell you?"

Josh eyed him warily. "She said she blew out her ACL."

Berto threw a dark, annoyed glance at Kat's door. "Typical. That's the least of her injuries."

Alarm jolted through him, sharper than any irritation he might've had with Kat. "What are you saying?"

Berto took his glasses off and rubbed at his eyes. Everyone was worn out - not by the fight, because they'd seen too many of those to be tired by them, but by the fact that not everyone in their tightly-knit team had made it out of the fight unscathed. "I just got back from MRI. I've seen the scans. Her knee is gone, Josh. The patella is shattered, the femur head is in about four pieces, the tibia and fibula are cracked... All of the ligaments are torn or completely severed. And don't get me started on what the muscle looks like. Her skin isn't broken, and that's the only thing holding it all together. We were lucky, though - internal bleeding was almost nil, which is why she's still alive."

Josh stared. If he'd felt bad before, now he was dying. Still, the whole thing was happening through a glaze of disbelief. He couldn't bring the question to voice, but Berto was his brother in all but blood, and he didn't need to say anything.

"She's never going to walk unaided again," Berto said, low and subdued.

"Never," Josh repeated.

Berto shook his head. "The doctors wanted to take her into surgery thirty minutes ago."

"Thanks for waiting." Berto had power of attorney for all of Team Steel. He also had the final say on medical procedures. He'd waited for Josh to arrive because he knew Josh would want to speak to Kat himself. Like brothers.

Berto slipped his glasses on again. It made him look smarter but no less tired. "By the time we got to the emergency room, she was blacking out from the pain. She's conscious right now because they've got morphine in the IV drip."

Josh put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry, bro."

"No, it was good that she had someone..." His voice trailed off as the doctors and nurses emerged with Kat on a gurney. Off to surgery, obviously.

One of the doctors drew Berto to the side and starting talking medical stuff. The jargon flew too fast and thick for Josh to bother listening. Instead, he followed alongside the gurney for a few seconds, reaching through the nurses and the IV lines to touch her arm.

"We'll be waiting for you," he told her, then fell back as the nurses politely elbowed him away.

"Hey, McGrath," she said, pushing up and looking back; the nurses fussed over her, trying to push her back down. She shoved them away.

Josh straightened up further. She rarely called either of them by their last names anymore, and when she did, it meant she had something important to say. "Yeah?"

The effort it was taking her was visible, but she asked the question, demanding reassurance - and never mind his promise to be waiting when she got out of surgery: "You got him, right?"

"I punched his teeth out for you," he called, and as the doors swung shut behind her, he could just make out a grin.

"You punched his teeth out?" Berto asked, coming to stand beside Josh. Evidently the doctor-to-doctor jargon conference was done.

The question brought it all back, coming in flashes of memory: Kat jumped too slow, Psycho's claw darted out and caught her around the knee, and he did something, twisted or something - there was a wet, muffled crunch that he now recognized as bones and tissues giving way - and she cried out; and then Kat was gone, taken off the field and rushed across the city by Berto, and it was just Max vs. Psycho. The oldest rivalry in the world, it felt like sometimes.

And honestly, after Kat had been injured, it had passed in a blur. He only remembered one thing about the fight, and that was the end of it.

Standing in the middle of the hospital hallway, weighed down by antiseptic smells and the skewed future, he thought it was a pyrrhic victory in every sense of the phrase. But that wasn't what he told Berto.

"Yeah," he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his blue jeans. "Made the greatest crunching noise."


End file.
